WP-Optimize – Chico Designs

Make WordPress Lightning Fast: Complete Guide (Updated for 2019)

Robert Stigers — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 23:55:24 +0000

Welcome to our comprehensive guide to improve loading speed on WordPress websites! After you apply the changes mentioned in this article you will likely see a significant decrease in loading time. This guide should help make your WordPress site fast.

Sections

2. Test your Site to Determine the Baseline Speed

4. Enable Mod_deflate Server Compression

5. Enable Keep-Alive Connections

7. Use an Optimized WordPress Theme

8. Install WordPress Caching Software

10. Don’t Use Too Many Extra Plugins

13. Test to Determine the Improvement in Speed

Introduction

The latest Google search algorithm incorporates page loading speed into the rankings. If your website doesn’t load fast enough you might be losing both visitors and search engine ranking.

A study by Microsoft showed that a 2 second longer delay in page loading led to 3.8% decreased user satisfaction.

Luckily there are a few easy ways to decrease page loading speed that I will discuss in detail below, and also answer any questions you have in the comments section.

Test your Site to Determine the Baseline Speed

A lot of web developers skip the baseline speed test, but it’s important to be able to see if the changes you make to the site actually made any difference.

My favorite website speed test is: http://www.webpagetest.org, other popular ones to check out are https://gtmetrix.com and http://tools.pingdom.com/.

Test a few different pages of your site and write down some of the load time results for comparison. If you use webpagetest.org you can create a profile for free and it will save your test results so you can look at them later for comparison.

Choose a FAST Web Host

If you haven’t chosen a website host yet and want budget hosting check out MidPhase for fast reliable shared hosting for less than $5 per month.

If you are looking for high quality specialized WordPress hosting try WP Engine. WP Engine is considered by many experts to be one of the fastest WordPress hosts.

Enable Mod_deflate Server Compression

Apache HTTP Server 2.0 and newer allow you to compress content sent between the server and visitors. If you are using shared hosting there is a good chance it’s running Apache and you can use mod_deflate to compress content and speed up loading time.

If you have cPanel installed on your server you can enable server compression by going to Optimize Website, under the Software section and enabling compression on all content or specific content types.

If you don’t have the Optimize Website option in cPanel, you can still enable it on Apache 2.0 servers by adding this line to your .htaccess file:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript

Enable Keep-Alive Connections

Keep-alive means that your server will make one connection to a visitor and transfer multiple files to them at once, rather than connecting separately for each file.

It can significantly speed up your site, and save server resources. If you are not sure if your site has keep-alive enabled or not you can use this keep alive website tester.

To enable keep-alive connections add the following code to your .htaccess file:

Header set Connection keep-alive

Install CloudFlare

CloudFlare offers a free content delivery network, improves website security, and will speed up your site.

It might be a little bit more of a hassle to setup CloudFlare than just installing a plugin, but it’s worth it, and should only take about 5 minutes to configure.

After you sign up for an account, type in your website address, continue through the process until they give you the new nameservers for your site.

Login to your domain hosting company and set custom nameservers to the ones CloudFlare gives you.

If you have questions or need help setting up CloudFlare leave a comment, or send me an email and I’ll help.

Use an Optimized WordPress Theme

Not all WordPress themes are equal. Some are much better designed than others. My favorite marketplace to look for themes is ThemeForest.net.

Almost all WordPress themes have a live demo online. Before purchasing a theme run some tests on it to make sure it’s fast and doesn’t have any error

All of the themes on Theme Forest come with lifetime updates (but some will be discontinued). To increase the changes that your theme will continue to be updated I recommend getting one of the more popular ones, like one from the top 50.

To test if a WordPress theme (or any site) has errors

1. Visit the theme demo using Chrome as your browser.

2. Right click on a blank part of the page then click, “Inspect”. An alternative to the right clicking method is to use Crtl-Shift-I.

3. A window should pop up with code and other information. If the site has
an error it will show a red circle with an X in it. If a site has a warning it will show a yellow triangle with exclamation point. The example image shows 3 errors and 1 warning.

Three free tools to test a theme demo website

They do pretty much the same thing, but you might want to check them all out to decide which you prefer.

I personally like Web Page Test the most, but have heard others say they like GT Metrix.

Web Page Test – http://www.webpagetest.org/
GT Metrix – https://gtmetrix.com/
Pingdom – http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Install WordPress Caching Software

I recommend using W3 Total Cache, a free WordPress plugin. Once installed it creates a menu item in the admin area of your site called Performance.

Under Performance > General Settings, enable page cache, and browser cache. Under Performance > Browser Cache I recommend using the same settings as in the image.

These options should work fine with a standard shared hosting account or premium hosting account. Minify can also be used with most shared hosts, but I have had issues with objects and CSS not loading correctly on the frontend using some minify settings, so test it to make sure it doesn’t cause any issues.

To test the site browser comparability I testing the site using Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Utilize Browser Caching

Browser caching is when the browser stores specific types of content on a local computer so that it loads faster on subsequent visits.

Many of the cache plugins like W3 Total Cache include the ability to leverage browser caching, but if you are not using a caching plugin for some reason you can enable it by adding this code to your .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/html “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year”
ExpiresDefault “access 1 month”

Don’t Use Too Many Extra Plugins

Plugins can significantly slow down your site. Many are poorly written or have errors.

Professional WordPress developer try to install as few plugins as possible, and are selective about which ones they use.

Some plugins will load resources from an entirely different website every time a page is loaded, such as Facebook like buttons and Twitter feeds.

There is an easy way to determine which plugins are slowing down your site, install P3. P3 is a free WordPress plugin that tells you exactly how your plugins are affecting load speed.

Keep your Database Clean

The easiest way to keep the database in top shape is to use WP-Optimize.

You can enable scheduled cleanup and optimization under the WP-Optimize auto clean-up settings. Set it to automatically optimize your site every week or month to keep your database clean.

Using WP-Optimize is much more convenient than logging into phpMyAdmin and optimizing the database manually, but you can do it that way to avoid installing the plugin.

Optimize Images

There are two good image optimizer plugins I recommend checking out: WP Smush.it and EWWW Image Optimizer.

We use EWWW on out site, it seems to work with more image formats than WP Smush.it. It also works with a few gallery plugins to optimize their images.

[2019] We now recommend Shortpixel Image Optimizer over EWWW and WP Smush.it. It has the option to use webp format images, which are significantly smaller than other formats. The webp version of images for this site is about 60% smaller, and are lossless, so look exactly the same.

Test to Determine the Improvement in Speed

Now it’s time to compare your baseline speed test results with the test results after optimizing the loading speed.

It should hopefully load faster, and get better grades/ratings from the speed metrics site you use.

You can go into your plugins settings and tweak the options to try to improve the loading speed, such as configuring minify through W3 Total Cache.

Have some other ideas on making a WordPress site fast? Leave a comment below

How to Install a WordPress Plugin

Robert Stigers — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 23:18:45 +0000

Some basic step-by-step information about how to install a plugin on a WordPress website

Login to your WP admin area. It should be located at http://yoursite.com/wp-admin
In the admin area go to Plugins > Add New
In the search box search for the plugin you want to add. Here are recommended plugins
Click the “Install Now” button for the plugin you want to install
It should say the plugin was successfully installed, now click “Activate Plugin” to enable it
The plugin should now be installed and enabled!

Most plugins add a link to the admin menu at the bottom, or sometimes under settings, or under tools. You should find the settings for the plugin you installed and make sure they are setup correctly. For example after installing the UpdraftPlus plugin it adds a link in the admin menu under Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups. After installing UpdraftPlus you should click that link to adjust the settings for the plugin.

See our WordPress Web Design Portfolio

12 Reasons to Create your Website using WordPress

Robert Stigers — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 23:21:05 +0000

Learning to Use WordPress is Easy. Well, maybe not easy, but easier than a lot of the alternatives. Many people have written extensive tutorials, documentations, and walk-throughs for WordPress. There are 1000’s of videos on YouTube and other video sites introducing people to the basics of using WordPress, or showing how to do specific tasks. There is also the official WordPress support forum and numerous other forums dedicated to WordPress topics.

WordPress works great for all types of websites, blogs, and e-commerce sites. WordPress is a versatile, easy to use CMS (content management system). It was originally created for blogs, but has evolved into one of the top platforms for creating any type of website. One of the best e-commerce plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, is a free and fully functional shopping cart program that automatically calculates shipping costs, accept payments, and more. There are also plugins like bbPress to create a forum, or BuddyPress t0 create a social network using WordPress.

Free WordPress Themes

There are 10,000+ themes available: free and commercial ones. There are lots of really good themes for WordPress, to make the site look and function all different ways. The commercial themes are usually higher quality and often times include better support. Commercial themes for WordPress tend to cost around $6o for each website, so are affordable.

WordPress is open source software. WordPress is free open source software, and has strong community support behind it. A lot of free software has little or no support, but WordPress has a support forum with many experts willing to help anyone they can troubleshoot their issues. Since the software is open source someone with programming skills can alter the software to function however you want.

WordPress is great for big or small sites. If your blog gets incredibly popular all of a sudden you don’t need to switch from WordPress, it is made to be scalable. A few big companies that use WordPress: Sony, MTV, New York Times, Time Magazine, and more here.

WordPress has a community working to keep WordPress secure. With about 20% of self-hosted websites running WordPress it has developed a large community of developers working to keep WordPress safe. When an update for WordPress, a plugin, or theme, is released it is easily updated by clicking the update button on the plugin page. This makes it simple to keep the software up to date and secure at all times. Automatically backing up your website daily, weekly, or monthly, to a secure cloud sever is also possible using a plugin like, “UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration”.

WordPress Post Editor

Revisions and automatic saves while working on an article. Say you are working on an article while your cat comes by, stepping on the keyboard, causing it freeze before having had a chance to save. You don’t need to worry with WordPress because it saves drafts of articles while you are working on them. When you go back to the article editor it will say there is a newer version of the article you were editing, and gives you the option to continue working on it. If you publish an article and then check the front-end only to realize it looks terrible, you can use revisions to go back.

There are approximately 35,000 plugins available. There are plugins to do just about everything. You can turn WordPress into any type of website you need using the available themes and plugins. There are plugins for contact forms, social media integration, SEO optimization, automated backups to Dropbox, caching, sitemaps, firewalls, minifying, reducing SPAM, image sliders, mobile displays, image galleries, user statistics, Google maps, newsletters, calendars, share buttons, and much more.

WordPress has an easy to use administrator area. You can login to the administrator area to easily edit content with WordPress. WordPress includes a decent page / post editor that allows you to edit websites without needing to know HTML. You can also easily insert images, galleries, and videos using the editor software. You can also install plugins to change the default editor, adding more functions.

WordPress Media Library

Easy media management. WordPress has an image manager that makes it easy to put images, videos, and audio into articles. All you need to do to add media is upload it to the media library, set the URL, caption, alignment, and click the insert button. You can also insert hosted videos from sites like YouTube by pasting the URL in the media manager under, “Insert from URL”.

WordPress is search engine friendly. The WordPress platform itself was designed to be highly optimized for search engines, but with a few extra plugins it can be awesome. For SEO I would recommend, “WordPress SEO” by Yoast, which allows you to see and edit the appearance of your pages on Google searches, increasing click-through rates. A cache program speeds up your site, which is a metric used by Google to determine your website rankings. A sitemap plugin like, “Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps” will create a XML sitemap and automatically submit it to Google, to make sure they index every page of your website.

Easily add additional editors, contributors, and administrator. It’s simple to add a new user in the WordPress admin area who can help write posts but doesn’t have permission to change the theme, or make edits to the configuration. WordPress allows you to add multiple editors, contributors, and administrators, and will also email their new password to them automatically.

See WordPress Website Examples

Here are the REQUIRED Plugins for a New WordPress Site

Robert Stigers — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 03:34:20 +0000

Here are a few awesome plugins you might want to consider installing on your WordPress site

Akismet – Helps block SPAM comments which are prevalent on WordPress sites. You need to generate a key to use the software, which is free on the Akismet website. You can also shut off comments completely to avoid having to deal with SPAM comments.

Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps – This program will generate and cache a sitemap you can submit to Google through Webmaster Tools. Submitting a sitemap will help make sure that all the pages of your site are indexed by Google. It can also create a gzip version of your sitemap to save space and bandwidth.

Better WordPress Minify – Allows you to combine and minify your CSS and JS files to improve page load time. This plugin uses the PHP library Minify and relies on WordPress’s enqueueing system rather than the output buffer, which respects the order of CSS and JS files as well as their dependencies.

Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – Really powerful backup software that can upload complete backups directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud providers. It can keep a fixed amount of backup copies, and automatically backup your site at an interval, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

WordPress SEO by Yoast– Allows you to customize the title and description for each page or post. It shows you exactly how the page will look in a Google search.

WP-Optimize – A database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to clean and optimize your database tables, and can be set to automatically optimize the tables daily, weekly, etc.

WP Super Cache – Generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress site. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the WordPress PHP scripts

Specialty Plugins

bbPress – Forum software. focused on ease of integration, ease of use, web standards, and speed.

BuddyPress – Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team, or niche community.

WooCommerce – Excellent E-commerce software. Packed full of features, integrates into your self-hosted WordPress website.